How much does a Tobii X2-30 or X2-60 eye tracker cost?

Good question! I’m looking to do some eye tracking research and couldn’t find any kind of price figure online, which generally means if you have to ask, you can’t afford it – so I enquired via email to a Tobii retailer, and they didn’t email me an answer: they sent me a powerpoint presentation containing the answer.

Basically, it costs a lot – but to be more specific (and as of March 2013):

– A (30Hz) Tobii X2-30 will cost you $1,100AUD per month to hire, or $20,000AUD to purchase,

or if you’re feeling frisky…

– A (60Hz) Tobii X2-60 will cost you $2,000AUD per month to hire, or a cool $40,000AUD to buy outright.

None of these prices include tax, so add around 20% or so to those figures depending on where in the world you’re situated.

That dog will not hunt, so I’m trying to find other universities who might have eye-tracking hardware that I could possibly borrow for a short while – or if I really had to bite the bullet, I’d be trying to get all my experimental code working using a mouse cursor as the eye-gaze location, and then hire a X2-30 for a week just to undertake the trials…

Crazy prices! We have a similar performance 60 Hz unit at $350 right now at http://www.gazept.com which might be easier than building your own :) We just got back from presenting at SIGGRAPH and some of the feedback was our unit even worked better.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences and by far SIGGRAPH was the coolest. I guess it helps it’s about computer graphics so lots of eye-candy, but tonnes of cool tech too. Next year is in Vancouver, our home town, so definitely going again!

That’s my understanding of it, although never having used a Tobii device I can’t say for sure what software they bundle with it.

I’ve ordered a GP3 eye tracker from Gazepoint and will let you know what software comes with it when it arrives in a few weeks, but I think it’s just going to be a calibration tool and something to move the mouse cursor in Windows.

If you were just doing eye tracking (not eye controlling) then all you’d need is a simple logger app – kick it off, get people to use a website / look at an advert or whatever then stop the eye logger and you’ll have the data to analyse to create a heatmap or what have you. If you want to implement eye-gestures and such then you’ll likely need to write the gesture recognition code into your software. Unless the GP3 software does some gesture recognition, though I’ve not seen that it does.

We’ve never had the budget for a Tobii either (back in grad school we couldn’t afford one so I built one and started this whole journey!). So I can’t say what software comes with it, but I believe it’s priced similarly to their hardware. The GP3 comes with an easy to use piece of usability software for generating heatmaps and fixationmaps (scanpaths), no programming required. On the developer side we also have an easy to use API so if you do want to do eye-gestures then you can write that yourself. Thanks for grabbing a GP3 by the way!

I’ve had a play with the GP3 tracker I got and it seems pretty good (though admittedly I have nothing to compare it to). Also, I saw in my email that there’s a new version of the Gazepoint software (v1.50) which improves the eye tracking accuracy even further, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out just yet.

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